Here’s a thing that people are doing
1. What is your blog about?
This one? I honestly don’t know anymore. It’s turned into an outlet for extreme frustration, but I hope it will eventually be something else (again)
2. What will you never write about?
Topic-wise, I’ll take anything, as long as I can find a scientific/research angle to it. I have yet to encounter something for which I did not find a scientific angle.
Style-wise, I will never give out personal information about other people (and try not to do that about myself too much either)
3. Have you ever considered leaving science?
Leave science? Leave research, yes. I am leaving it right now. But I don’t think I can leave science itself. Whatever I end up doing I always find some way to connect it to something related to science. Even at the gym, I’m fascinated by the elliptical trainer, and marvel how my brain makes my legs move and that causes my heart to beat faster and the machine detects that through my hands holding the metal bars and reports it back to me and tells me what to do to make it go down again. That’s amazing, isn’t it? So, no, I don’t think I can ever leave science (behind).
4. What would you do instead?
I just.. were you even listening?
5. What do you think will science blogging be like in 5 years?
Ah. Hm. I’m not sure. Initially I thought “different”, but I’ve been blogging since 2000 (general, and later science since 2005) and that hasn’t changed much. I do think there will be more liveblogging and microblogging, because there will be more people with phones that can access the web everywhere. Blogging will be less of a thing to sit down for.
(Added later) There will be so many science blogs that we have to specialize. There will be “chemistry bloggers” and “science education bloggers” and “angry evolution bloggers” and “people blogging their own work” and “calcium release bloggers” all as separate subcategories within the community.
6. What is the most extraordinary thing that happened to you because of blogging?
I realized that other people like research much more than I do, and that I should be doing other things. If it hadn’t been for blogging and the whole community of people writing lovingly about their work, I would have assumed everyone just trudged along in the lab.
7. Did you write a blog post or comment you later regretted?
Not on any of my science blogs. I have learned my lesson the hard way before I started those. (So, yes.)
8. When did you first learn about science blogging?
I invented it.
So did many others, at the same time or before that. It was a pretty obvious invention.
I have had some kind of blog since 2000, in various forms, and in different places. I thought that it would be nice to have a place to just write about science stuff. When I started, I could only find a handful of other science blogs.
Actually I was talking about this recently with a non-science blogging friend (yes, that hyphen is in the right place). We reminisced the days that you could have a blogger meetup in Toronto, and there would only be 10 people, and we’d all know each other. If we’d do that now, the whole city would show up, and it wouldn’t be fun, so now we have to stick to groups related to the topic we blog about to get a somewhat reasonable size community. Oh, wait, I’m going to go back and add something to answer 5.
9. What do your colleagues at work say about your blogging?
I don’t know if they know about it. The people that read my blog all left. (Not a causal reaction, I hope…)
10. Extra credit: are you able to write an entry to your blog that takes the form of a poem about your research?
A poem? Heh. Apparently not, but I have written haikus
I like your answer to #8. Around 2000 sounds about right.
And I like the “calcium release bloggers”. I think that further specialization is a pretty good prediction.
Stupid me. You were talking about this calcium release blogger.
Great post, Eva. When I started blogging I read a few books on it, including Rebecca Blood’s classic The Weblog Handbook. It was quite funny reading her remarks about the start of blogging, how there were these blogging directories with lists of all the world’s blogs, and everyone knew each other. (Reminds me of the old story about computing, when it was estimated that 3 would be needed in the UK.)
Hey, Eva, Richard doesn’t say what goes as a poem. I think you’ve expertly covered challenge #10-or-11-who’s-counting! As I wrote to Maxine, I’m doing myself a disservice by reading the other meme responders, but it’s actually quite fun and illuminating. What was #7, in vague terms?
I retold a funny thing that happened to my sister, and someone found that by Googling her name and put it on a fan site for her swim team. (The thing that happened was related to a training.)